Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday April 02, 2014 @05:10PM
from the year-of-something-on-the-somethingtop dept.

girlmad writes: "Google has scored a major win on the back of Microsoft's Windows XP support cut-off. The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham has begun moving all its employees over to Samsung Chromebooks and Chromeboxes ahead of the 8 April deadline. The council was previously running 3,500 Windows XP desktops and 800 XP laptops, and is currently in the process of retiring these in favour of around 2,000 Chromebooks and 300 Chromeboxes. It estimates the savings at around £400,000 compared to upgrading to newer Windows machines — no small change."

They're replacing a current stock of 4,300 of what used to be mid- to high-end hardware (when they were bought of course - after all they were designed to run Windows - replacement would mean current mid- to high-end stuff or Windows won't run well) with 2,300 low-end ones.

That cuts down the number of computers in half, and it cuts the per-unit hardware cost. I can't imagine them saving some 150 pounds per unit on license cost alone. Windows isn't that expensive in OEM licenses. The price difference between

The system requirements for Windows are higher. If the machine is basically an RDP client, then there isn't much benefit in running a thick-client OS on a higher-end machine. The savings are partly from the Windows license and partly from the cheaper machines. A minimal *NIX install with FreeRDP is probably what they actually want, but the ChromeBook lets you have something that's a bit like this, with frequent vendor-provided software updates and no need to have someone in house configuring it.

Generally, Microsoft charges a premium of about $100 for the Windows Professional product, and likewise their other Enterprisy operating systems, in addition to things like Active Directory client licenses.

Factor in Office, and I'd assume the cost comparison is actually much more complex than the write up is suggesting. It's probably somewhere in the region of $500 per workstation (plus hardware for a "Microsoft solution", with zero subscription fees, or perhaps something lower

actually no. RTFM: London council dumping their old remote terminal and web browsing desktop machines with shiny new remote terminal and web browsing machines. Shiny new machines that are significantly cheaper.

They are also buying new Windows 7 PCs for specialist apps that don't run over RDP.

One thing to note: Windows 8 was not even considered (Mac and Linux considered but not chosen, due to the particular use-case they needed)

It doesn't sound like they're using web apps, at least not yet. From TFA:

At this stage we're still going to be using Office, Outlook and Exchange, but we're planning to look at a move to a cloud-based productivity and email tool later in the year and that would clearly be an evaluation of Google Apps and Office 365

No, but they were (apparently) using mostly Citrix apart from the power users. A Chromebook seems a good fit as a remote desktop client; you don't have any more issues with requiring an always on network than you started with. For once, a fairly sensible strategy it seems.

If using a Chromebook as a remote terminal, that makes sense, assuming a decent connection to Citrix. It means one less security issue (stolen/compromised laptops) to worry about. There is still security required when people have to log on, but that can be accomplished via SecurID or another 2FA system.

It means one less security issue (stolen/compromised laptops) to worry about.

The AC has it. It's all about data security, or at least that's certainly the thing that would have prised Windows from the hands of the managers. The costs/hassle of not worrying about losing sensitive data knocks all the other savings into a cocked hat.

I'll pretty much guarantee that managers will still have a full-blown laptop, no one wants to browse porn on a Chromebook, it's just powerless underlings that will have to learn a new OS and deal with cheap, shitty hardware. Their long-term cost savings will be negligible though. Place where I worked tried handing the field techs netbooks, within six months almost all of those that hadn't failed on their own were made to fail.

If using a Chromebook as a remote terminal, that makes sense, assuming a decent connection to Citrix. It means one less security issue (stolen/compromised laptops) to worry about. There is still security required when people have to log on, but that can be accomplished via SecurID or another 2FA system.

However unless you can divorce the chromebook from Google you have the very big security issue that device you are using as a terminal comes compromised as standard. (This would be the case with "tablets" o

These devices are designed to be jailbroken. The root switch involved a special keystroke on boot. It is fairly easy to put whatever you want on the Samsung Chromebook (I know very little about the chromebox but i think it has a physical "developer" switch). My Samsung Chromebook runs Ubuntu like a champ, but the touchpad is quite wonky and the hardware is just not the level of quality I'm used to. I'm tempted to trade up for an ASUS chromebook. x86 compatibility would also open up the possibility of u

If that's the choice I'd still go for the second. Gut feeling says Google cares more about preventing NSA snooping than MS. And now I don't exactly like Google's snooping to target their ads better (they do a pretty shitty job there anyway), at least it won't get you on secret no-fly lists.

Microsoft is far friendlier to the NSA than Google. Haven't you been reading the news?

More likely Google just has better PR than Microsoft in this respect. The only way in which Google could actually be unfriendly to the NSA would be to move to a country which the US Government couldn't argue with. The Russian Federation and PRC being about the only options here. (In which case Google would have no option but to be friendly with Russian or Chinese NSA equivalents.)

is for the diva to sing the operatic conclusion and for cats and dogs to get along.
Microsoft is so doomed. Who really needs them? Not most people.
Have you seen the latest Samsung tablets? Holy cow the better than Hi-def resolution, vivid colors, awesome performance, none of them running Windows, all of them running Android. I saw them recently and my first reaction was: Microsoft is so doomed.

is for the diva to sing the operatic conclusion and for cats and dogs to get along.

Microsoft is so doomed. Who really needs them? Not most people.

Have you seen the latest Samsung tablets? Holy cow the better than Hi-def resolution, vivid colors, awesome performance, none of them running Windows, all of them running Android. I saw them recently and my first reaction was: Microsoft is so doomed.

Yeah, all except for that pesky near 90% desktop market share, and the millions of applications people rely on that use a Windows operating system to do their work. The market is significantly broadening, no doubt, to include non-desktop/laptop computing platforms, but make no mistake, Windows is still very firmly entrenched on the desktop. And regular old computers where people still need to get work done on a day to day basis is still a lucrative market, if not as sexy as phones and tablets. The fact that it makes Slashdot headlines when a company or government branch moves away from Windows tells you that it's not exactly happening all over the place either.

Not trying to sound like a shill here, but let's try to stay realistic. MS is going nowhere for the foreseeable future. Unless, of course, they keep pissing off their desktop customers with garbage like Windows 8.

Although you'd think it was an everyday meme, a quick Google shows it's not used on Slashdot that often. I'm pretty sure it was in vogue at one point a decade or so ago, when every car/computer related story seemed to have it. But not now.

So be nice! Or are you a flummoxed MS employee in London who's watching his horses being taken to the knacker's yard?

The market is significantly broadening, no doubt, to include non-desktop/laptop computing platforms

Read the next sentence please. I'm not disagreeing with you, but all these starry-eyed predictions I've heard from the media / tech bloggers that the desktop will practically disappear completely is nonsense. The reason the desktop market is declining is that many light computing tasks (essentially, simple communication or the consumption of content) can be accomplished much better by phones and tablets, which are obviously a lot cheaper and more convenient than computers. These are the computers of the

-7.5% compound annual growth rate is massive, especially considering the growth rate of smartphones, tablets and chromeos. And that is not even taking into account the likelihood of productivity apps showing up on chromeos and android to further accelerate the trend. IDC's numbers are basically just talking about people who defect because they care more about media consumption than spreadsheets. That's a relatively small hole in the Windows bucket compared to having the whole bottom fall out when Android mo

-7.5% compound annual growth rate is massive, especially considering the growth rate of smartphones, tablets and chromeos. And that is not even taking into account the likelihood of productivity apps showing up on chromeos and android to further accelerate the trend. IDC's numbers are basically just talking about people who defect because they care more about media consumption than spreadsheets. That's a relatively small hole in the Windows bucket compared to having the whole bottom fall out when Android moves into the office.

I don't really see how productivity apps on tablets can replace actual PCs running actual business software within a corporate environment. Productivity software on a tablet means that you can access/view/share corporate documents perhaps, but create them? I'm not sure what you use a computer for in your work day, but I certainly couldn't possibly use a tablet to do my work. There's a LOT of business software out there that will simply never be ported to another OS either, and until it's depreciated comp

Even if they pissed off the retail customers, MS has one spot that they are virtually impossible to dislodge from, and that is the enterprise. For example, Exchange. There are other solutions (Zimba or Google Apps), but for scalability and management, there is no other messaging system that can handle the sheer amount of users that Exchange handles on a daily basis.

Same with Active Directory. LDAP is used in some small firms, but AD has scalability on its side.

There are alternatives to MS, but there isn't anything that can do the group policies to desktops on the massive scales that what is done with Windows.

Plus, MS knowledge is easy to find. I can pay $16,000/year and get a H-1B with a MCSE who is extremely competant, far more than local talent on average. Good luck with trying to find that with Linux.

Well, they were pissing off their corporate customers too, who are refusing to upgrade to Windows 8, even in the face of XP end of service looming. That being said, don't take my last comment for anything but tongue-in-cheek. MS is not stupid. Arrogant, yes, but smart enough to understand that they can't continue the "my way or the highway" act in perpetuity. In fact, they're already showing signs of relenting. In Windows 9 the start menu is coming back, metro apps can now be windowed, etc, etc.

You left out the US government. I work for the DOD and I still remember when Vista was launched to overall hatred by enterprise customers. No one was buying it but Uncle Stupid did. We had an excellent system running on XP Pro that worked flawlessly backed up by a good IT contractor. Vista came out and we switched to it and overnight we lost about 60 percent of our computers. They worked at it for a while and we ended up with just over half of them up and running at any one time. The IT guys worked th

Exchange is a horribly bloated and slow piece of work, in the days before super-fast supercomputer server clusters, Exchange would handle relatively few users compared to a mail system (that, admittedly didn't do calendar or tasks or other crap no-one uses).

Active Directory is LDAP, with a few extra bits Microsoft wanted to lock you into. To think that LDAP is not scalable but Active Directory is, is laughable.

MS knowledge is cheap- - you can pay $16k a year and get a MCSE who is really

is for the diva to sing the operatic conclusion and for cats and dogs to get along.

Microsoft is so doomed. Who really needs them? Not most people.

Have you seen the latest Samsung tablets? Holy cow the better than Hi-def resolution, vivid colors, awesome performance, none of them running Windows, all of them running Android. I saw them recently and my first reaction was: Microsoft is so doomed.

Once upon a time, payroll and accounting ran on a mainframe. On punched cards, no less.

OK, so your current system runs on Windows. And you've a captive audience that has no choice but to use IE. A browser whose world-wide usage rate has been dropping for years.

Some day, it's possible that the CIO is going to come in and say "We're switching all our financials to Oracle. They gave us a real good deal on an Exadata server. Running Oracle Linux. And apps written in Oracle Java.

Nothing is forever in computers. Not even Windows. Although the time spent waiting on virus scans can certainly make it seem like forever.

Some day, it's possible that the CIO is going to come in and say "We're switching all our financials to Oracle. They gave us a real good deal on an Exadata server. Running Oracle Linux. And apps written in Oracle Java.

That's nice. But what about the Desktop? Messaging? Office? All those other kooky little apps, add-ins and plug-ins the world runs on that all run on MS? You know IT is more than just Financials (most of which is Oracle and SAP already (ie not MS)), and there's lot more to a CIO's than a relgious crusade?

Believe it or not, I manage to work an office quite well without using Microsoft products. Although technically, I suppose you could call Skype a Microsoft product, even though I don't run it on Windows. OpenOffice has never been a problem for me, no matter what some people claim.

A CIO doesn't have to go on a "religious crusade" to make a change like that. All it takes is falling into the clutches of a good salesman. This is especially true in larger companies, where less-competent managers have basically a

2300 Chrome machines vs. 4300 XP machines, I wonder what the true saving are. Since the totals doesn't add up, what did they do eliminate 2000 workers and 2000 machines, or are they going to make 2000 workers use pen and paper or am I missing some here?

2300 Chrome machines vs. 4300 XP machines, I wonder what the true saving are. Since the totals doesn't add up, what did they do eliminate 2000 workers and 2000 machines, or are they going to make 2000 workers use pen and paper or am I missing some here?

No idea why the numbers changed (though it is pretty common in mass-update situations like this to audit workstation assignments and get rid of all the extra laptops that got requisitioned so that somebody could have two/etc).

However, I can easily see why a Chromebook is cheaper in a corporate environment, assuming it can run all your software. They're nearly zero-effort to deploy (just log in once using an admin account and it auto-provisions), self-update automatically, don't need antivirus, already have full-disk encryption and secure boot, and Google handles all the identity management. You only use them with remote applications (web or otherwise), so there is nothing to backup locally, and no retention issues with legal holds. Basically you can eliminate almost your entire workstation-management infrastructure, and the hardware isn't really any more expensive than what you'd otherwise purchase. If somebody breaks their laptop, they just go over to the supply closet and get a new one, log in, and in 30 seconds everything is auto-synced.

The catch is that you have to be able to run EVERYTHING in Chrome.

A chromebook gives any business a fairly complete enterprise-level workstation management service for free. To get to all the management functions you need a Google Apps account, but even Grandma gets a laptop that can't get viruses, backs up everything important offsite automatically, auto-updates, and which is fully encrypted. That is a whole bunch of software/configuration/caretaking if you want to do it on Windows.

If you RTFA you would have seen that a sizeable fraction of their staff had both a desktop and a laptop, and will only be receiving a chromebook as a replacement. Some workers will be updated to Windows 7 machines where they have applications that are not available in web based or Citrix based environments.

The requirement of stuff like Google Apps account and having Google do your identity management, will be a huge turn-off for many corporations. Unless Google has an option to have these services all in-house.

Especially when it comes to sensitive data (and not just medical, my personal financial records for example I don't want out in the open either) I'd like to keep it at home. Not unencrypted on someone else's cloud. And definitely not in some foreign country, where organisations like an NSA are active.

Well, you can keep it encrypted in someone else's cloud (assuming you trust them not to make that option not work in an update), but yes, it would be nice if Android/ChromeOS/etc could be pointed at your own authentication systems.

However, I can easily see why a Chromebook is cheaper in a corporate environment, assuming it can run all your software. They're nearly zero-effort to deploy (just log in once using an admin account and it auto-provisions), self-update automatically, don't need antivirus, already have full-disk encryption and secure boot, and Google handles all the identity management.

Having a third party manage things has it's own set of associated risks. Which may be poorly understood/managed if this is a radical change

Having a third party manage things has it's own set of associated risks. Which may be poorly understood/managed if this is a radical change of paradigm. Also "full-disk encryption" is pointless on a device which isn't storing data.A critical factor is how easy is corporate management with Chromebooks. Including can it be done using servers you control...

It would actually be nice to be able to point Android/Chromebooks/etc at your own servers. There is nothing about the design that necessitates that they talk to Google. That's just how Google set them up.

Full-disk encryption still protects your cache/cookies, and any files you may have downloaded just to view, or to upload somewhere else. It also prevents somebody else from installing a software keylogger/etc (in conjunction with secure boot). I think it is relevant for any PC.

Other issues include do you want Google (and their "friends") looking over what you are doing?

Beware of any statements like, "don't need antivirus" and "gets a laptop that can't get viruses"

The OS is read-only and uses secure-boot. If something does manage to install itself there, the device will refuse to boot and you need to do an OS reload from a thumb disk to restore it (which is fairly easy to do).

So, think of it like having the antivirus built-in. Otherwise everything happens in the Chrome browser where every tab runs in a jail. Sure, that can have bugs, but those get discovered and fixed by updates. So, again, think of it like having the anti-virus built-in.

Why can't a chromebook get a virus? have that made the disk read only or something? perhaps discovered some way to write a perfect OS with Zero vulnerabilities and no need to ever update it?

It uses secure boot. Look it up.:)

Sure, it might be possible to jailbreak it as is routinely done with iPhones, but it would require that kind of effort. Since every Chromebook has a little switch that lets you disable the secure boot feature after a self-imposed wipe nobody bothers to jailbreak them.

Basically it is like having tripwire on steroids. If the image isn't signed by Google and valid, then it won't run.

2300 Chrome machines vs. 4300 XP machines, I wonder what the true saving are. Since the totals doesn't add up, what did they do eliminate 2000 workers and 2000 machines, or are they going to make 2000 workers use pen and paper or am I missing some here?

Probably the numbers are real. Since we spent lots of our money on bailing out banks and wars, and big business doesn't pay tax any more, many areas of the public sector have been cut. Most local councils have shed workers wholesale.

1. They're replacing 4,300 Windows machines with 2,300 Chrome machines. Why is the number of boxes cut nearly in half?2. Did they factor in the cost of Google Apps?3. Did they factor in the issue of retraining and other migration costs?

Bet they didn't. Bet they just said they can stop buying Windows boxes and that's all there is to the cost.

They probably didn't factor in the cost of Google Apps; however, one has to ask, how does that compare to Enterprise licensing for Microsoft Office and the server licenses to support Exchange, Active Directory and file server(s)?

If you've ever sacrificed enough goats to divine the proper licensing you need to purchase from microsoft, you'll know the money they save/on software liscence cost alone/ will cover the hardware cost of even premium chromebooks 2 or 3 times over.

It does seem like a lot of people, one has to assume that there is only one system per person (there could be overlap with the Chromebooks for people that require portability). In 2011 the borough had a population of 187,000. 2,300 admin positions would be 1.23% of the population..

The unreasonable thing is being able to go from 3,500 XP desktops to a number closer to 2,000. I'd like to know how the number of total system can be reduced by 35% or more??? Maybe they are counting a warehouse of retired sy

"Tax paid by the UK financial services industry rose from £63bn to £65bn last year, equivalent to 11.7 per cent of total tax receipts to the Exchequer" --- Financial Times, December 2013. Also the top 1% of earners paid 30% of all income tax. Banking is a regulated industry. The sort of dodges which sports stars and actors use to avoid paying millions in tax just aren't allowed. So the Square Mile isn't in fact the problem at all.

Moving from MSFT is a great move but jumping into Google's camp is a bad move. It's trading one set of evils/problems with another. A few years ago I would have said great move but Google lately has started to become a more smiling version of Apple and Microsoft and frankly is pushing their commercial interests above that of open computing. London Council can be proud of saving money but in a few years I think we'll be hearing another headline that they're switching to something else.

They save some physical space and importantly power. It depends on how much RAM the old PC have too.. A nice trick is to make the PCs diskless workstations, that makes them reliable (no hard drive) and replaceable on a whim. But if you're going to do everything on a browser having at least 2GB memory is nice, especially if you have no swap.

Or they could just hire some kids to load Linux -- I could load Linux on a lot of old computers with a locked down linux and browser. The Chromebooks will be $200 per.

A year ago I bought an Acer C7 Chromebook and installed Linux on it. Its my first Linux laptop that has a complete and working set of drivers. Of all the previous PC laptops that I have had and converted to Linux upon their retirement, they were always glitchy in one way or another, or lacked drivers.

I have had much better luck with desktops but I tended to build my own and tended to go with well regarded parts.

That said, for US$200 the Acer C7 is a pretty good Linux laptop for the money. The screen a

Personally in our organization we like to save money but we also view buying a laptop as a very low cost expense. When an employee costs $100-$200k to employ (overhead, office space, janitorial, taxes, healthcare etc) a $1,000 system every 2 years or so is a tiny drop in the bucket.

At $150k / 40 hour weeks * 48 weeks = $79 per hour.

At that rate it only takes 10 hours of time savings before the computer (or $1,000 software) is "free". 10 hours sounds like a lot but if your employee has to wait 2 minutes a day for 2 years for a slow process you're looking at over $1,000 in wasted time. 2 minutes a day is a very very low bar for achievement.

Instead of trumpeting how much they saved on licensing fees, I would ask how much time they are saving--or are they? Is this just the IT department triumphantly cutting their budget or HR picking up the expense of extra employees to do the same work. That's the headline I would be interested in. If this saved them having 2 employees then they would save 400,000 pounds. If it meant they needed 3 more employees then they not only replaced the upgrade fees but actually increased their net budget.

I would suspect that WindowsRT like you say would probably be the easiest transition. I would argue that more than 2 minutes per day would be lost to Linux "hiccups" and confusion.

If you're worried about gaining two minutes a day by getting faster computer hardware, maybe you should first have a look at the coffee machine. I bet there's much more of a time saving to be found there.

Our new whitelisting software slows down one of our export processes from 2 minutes to around 14, because it hashes all the files it reads and outputs and eats CPU doing it.

So it goes from something people will run multiple times an hour, to something that people will seriously think twice about doing. All the productivity gains of rewriting the software and taking some pains to make it multithreaded erased because it has got to the point where the IT department won't trust your computer to do anything oth

Windows RT is a locked down version of the real Windows 8 (fine) but it comes with a consumer version of Office without Access and other stuff, and can't join a domain (and can't share files like Windows home editions are able to) and can't get GPOs applied.

They're using the Chromebooks as thin clients anyway. Windows runs on the server farm. If web browsing is allowed on the Chrome boxen, using the Chrome browser for your errands and looking up stuff etc. is pretty elegant, as the big strain on CPU and RAM

I work in K12 schools. We've moved from the smaller Samsungs to the 14-inch HP Chromebook. It feels like a much more substantial machine and it's a hell of a lot faster. We've just started with them so I can't vouch for how they are going to do once we let the kids get ahold of them for a while. Of course at no more than $327 a pop, we can afford to replace them a lot easier than a Windows laptop.